It sometimes seems like our once-brave experiment with democracy is today under siege with the proliferation of voter suppression laws being passed by states and localities and the Supreme Court upholding near-unbridled use of money in elections, which has eviscerated campaign reform efforts. But this is neither the first nor last time we must choose democracy and social justice over discrimination and plutocracy. Fortunately, thousands of individuals and groups have joined to wage this struggle.

This blog will be the first of two. Today’s will focus on the first problem — the gutting of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 in the Supreme Court decision Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder (Shelby, for short) handed down in June 2013. Last week (August 6) we celebrated the 49th anniversary of that significant day. The next blog will concern the issue of “big money” in the upcoming mid-term elections of 2014.

Let’s start with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a landmark piece of legislation that enshrines the key principles of fair voting rights so important in a democracy. Designed to enforce the voting rights guaranteed by the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the Constitution, the VRA prohibits any state or local government from imposing laws that result in discrimination against racial or language minorities. Until recently, the law enjoyed widespread bipartisan support in Congress and was reauthorized four times, most recently in 2006. Just one telling statistic from an article by Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-FL) in the August 6, 2014 issue of The Root demonstrates how significant the VRA is: only 6.7% of eligible Black Mississippians were registered to vote in 1962; by 1969 that figure jumped to 66.5%.

The Brennan Center for Justice calls the VRA “a uniquely effective law” that blocked 86 legislative discriminatory actions through its administrative process and several more through litigation just from 1998 to 2013.

This state of affairs changed dramatically in June 2013 when the Supreme Court ruled in Shelby that a key enforcement provision in the VRA (Section 5) was unconstitutional. This provision, known as the “coverage formula,” encompassed those jurisdictions that had engaged in the most egregious voting discrimination in 1965. The Court reasoned that Section 5 was no longer responsive to current conditions.

Even before Shelby, the laws and practices included in the VRA were under attack, but the VRA enabled the federal government to deal forcefully with the state or locality. The Advancement Project, a civil rights organization that has filed and handled many lawsuits against offending jurisdictions, maintains that an unprecedented campaign to suppress voting among students, minorities, immigrants, ex-felons and the elderly has occurred in the past few years, especially since 2010. For example, repeated attempts have been made to purge voter databases with the intent of disenfranchising certain voters.

Indeed, the Advancement Project was correct. An investigative report by the Center for American Progress (CAP) uncovered the presence of a systematic campaign that was orchestrated particularly since the mid-term election of 2010, funded largely by David and Charles Koch through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). In 2011 alone, 38 states introduced legislation designed to impede voters at every step of the electoral process.

While many of these efforts are longstanding, in the one year since Shelby, the Brennan Center for Justice has discerned three major impacts of the Supreme Court decision:

• Section 5 (the key enforcement provision) no longer blocks discriminatory voting practices, which have reached epidemic proportions
• Challenging discriminatory laws and practices is now more difficult, expensive and time-consuming
• The public now lacks critical information about voting that Section 5 had made mandatory prior to changing any voting laws or practices

The first impact identified by the Brennan Center receives the most commentary because it focuses on the extensive discrimination in all voter-suppression efforts. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights issued a report in June 2014 entitled “The Persistent Challenge of Voting Discrimination.” The new report details 148 separate instances of racial discrimination in voting since 2000. Each activity might impact tens of thousands of voters and, as large as these numbers might be, they undoubtedly underestimate the dire situation because the numbers represent only reported and documented cases. Some key findings of the report include:

1. Racial discrimination in voting remains a significant problem in our democracy.
2. The problem of racial discrimination in voting is not limited to one region of the country.
3. Voting discrimination occurs most often in local elections.
4. Discrimination in voting manifests itself in many ways, and new methods continue to emerge.

Since the Shelby decision, voter suppression laws have been unleashed throughout the country, including polling place closures, discriminatory voter ID laws, new restrictions on early voting, and the elimination of majority-black and -Latino districts for local elections. These discriminatory practices have come to light in several states including Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Virginia and North Carolina. In 2014 alone, according to the National Conference of State Legislators (NCSL), voter ID legislation was introduced in 24 states. NCSL says that 11 states have strict voter ID laws – 8 with strict photo ID laws and 3 with strict non-photo ID laws. Twenty states have less strict voter-ID laws. The remaining 19 states currently require no documentation to vote.

With respect to photo-ID laws, CAP reports that 11% of American citizens, but 25% of African-Americans, do not possess a government-issued photo ID (over 21 million people), and three of the photo-ID bills to have passed – in South Carolina, Texas and Tennessee – expressly do not allow students to use photo IDs issued by state educational institutions to vote. The Brennan Center for Justice says that Mississippi plans to enforce its photo-ID law in this next election cycle, despite the fact that 35% of the state’s voting-age population lives more than 10 miles from the nearest office that issues photo IDs and 13 contiguous counties with sizable African-American populations lack a single full-time driver’s license office.

An often overlooked feature of the VRA that helped ensure enfranchisement of minority voters was the deployment of federal observers. To ensure fair elections from 1995 to 2012, more than 10,700 federal observers were sent to polls in the states and localities covered by Section 5. Without these observers, voters are much more vulnerable to discrimination.

A report issued by the National Commission on Voting Rights last week said that jurisdictions previously covered under parts of the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court eliminated, “continue to implement voting laws and procedures that disproportionately affect African-American, Latino, Asian and Native-American voters.”

Without a doubt, the most restrictive voter suppression laws were passed in the state of North Carolina – a strict photo-ID requirement, a drastic cut-back on early voting, a reduction in the period for voter registration, and an inability for a ballot to be deemed “provisional” if cast in the wrong precinct. Nearly all are being challenged by the North Carolina NAACP, the Advancement Project. and the League of Women Voters.

It’s exceedingly difficult to deny that voter suppression laws are politically motivated because a major probe by the Justice Department between 2002 and 2007 failed to prosecute a single person for going to the polls and impersonating an eligible voter. Out of the 300 million votes cast during that period, only 86 people were convicted of voter fraud, and nearly all of these cases involved immigrants and former felons who were simply unaware of their ineligibility. Since these findings are fairly well-known, one has to conclude that governors who are signing new voting restrictions have solutions that are searching for a problem.

As former President Bill Clinton said in 2012, “There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today.”

Section 5’s loss will be felt most acutely at the local level, which was the focus of most discriminatory changes under the VRA. The Brennan Center for Justice indicates that 10 of the 15 states that had been covered in whole or in part by Section 5 had introduced new restrictive legislation that would make it more difficult for minority voters to cast a ballot. Many of these restrictions involved redrawing of district boundaries to impede minority (sometimes African-American, sometimes Latino) participation in local elections.

The second effect of the Shelby ruling is to make challenging discriminatory voting laws more difficult, expensive and time-consuming. When Section 5 was still in effect, the VRA enabled prior federal review to ensure nondiscrimination before any new voting law went into effect. That meant that the vast majority of actions were accomplished through an administrative process that was cheaper, faster and easier than litigation. An administrative process is no longer an option. Parties who challenge discriminatory laws can only do so ex post facto and face lengthy court filings, motions, notices and briefs, both large and small, all of which add to the time and expense of the litigants. And this is true even when lawsuits are consolidated, as they have been in a number of jurisdictions.

The third impact of the Shelby decision is a lack of transparency for thousands of election laws. Formerly, Section 5 required any change to a voting law or practice to include input from the public, during the review or practice of the law as well as during court litigation, if any. There was also a centralized method for monitoring any changes before they were implemented and a notification process after implementation. Since all of this is gone, thousands of changes to voting procedures may go unnoticed by the voting public. Such a lack of transparency also means an absence of accountability. There is now no centralized method for keeping the community informed of election-law changes.

It should be clear that any attempt to claim that the loss of Section 5 of the VRA is trivial is woefully wrong. Interestingly, Attorney General Eric Holder has been doubling his efforts to get this message across to his audiences as he crisscrosses the country speaking out on the issue of voter suppression. There is little doubt that he views voting rights as a defining moral question for this country. But his tough talk also includes action. As July ended, the Department of Justice (DOJ) filed two separate “friend-of-the-court” briefs, one arguing against Wisconsin’s voter-ID law (already struck down by a federal judge and currently on appeal), and the other in opposition to Ohio’s recent cuts to early voting and same-day registration. MSNBC reports that these actions mark the first time that DOJ has intervened in voting disputes outside jurisdictions covered by Section 5 of the VRA. These interventions follow up on lawsuits already brought by DOJ last year against Texas’s ID law (which Holder called a “poll tax” in one of his speeches) and North Carolina’s sweeping voting laws.

In January 2014, a group of bipartisan lawmakers, led by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, introduced the Voting Rights Act Amendment (VRAA) in the Senate, and a companion bill was also introduced in the House. The VRAA offers nationwide protections for all threats to citizens’ voting rights with new tools to halt voting discrimination before it occurs. It ensures that proposed election changes are transparent and that jurisdictions that discriminate are held accountable. Many of the key provisions that allowed the VRA to effectively counter voting discrimination have been brought up-to-date, and most significantly, applied nationwide to all jurisdictions. The VRAA would immediately apply to four states – Texas, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi, but would act to remedy current voting discrimination wherever it occurs. However, while the Senate has at least begun to hold hearings, the House has not yet even considered the VRAA. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), has said he “isn’t sure new legislation is needed.”

NALEO, the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials; NHLA, National Hispanic Leadership Agenda; and MALDEF, the Latino Legal Voice for Civil Rights in America are among the many organizations supporting the VRAA. Reports of these groups have outlined numerous examples throughout the country of Latino voting discrimination, indicating that it is obvious, egregious and far-reaching. Most telling is the fact that almost seven million Latinos eligible to vote live in jurisdictions previously subject to the requirements of Section 5 and since the Shelby decision are without those protections. The anti-democratic practices we have referred to above are enumerated in their reports — purges of voter lists, redistricting without warning, proof of citizenship for voter registration and restrictive voter-ID requirements. They call for a return of federal observers for all elections to ensure compliance with voting rights laws and are correct in stating strongly that it is a myth that voting discrimination has disappeared.

Eric Holder, himself, has pushed for an even stronger version of the VRAA, especially in the area of voter-ID laws. Recently, he has teamed up with Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) in an effort to restore voting rights to some felons. MSNBC said on August 6, that “his commitment to ensuring access to the ballot for all eligible Americans could stand out as his most important achievement.”

We know that greater voter participation strengthens our nation and democracy. The future vitality of our democracy depends on encouraging efforts to pass the VRAA so that all people, regardless of their race or ethnicity, class, age, or gender can, without difficulty, carry out the precious privilege of voting. The fact that the United States is now a democracy does not mean that it is a foregone conclusion that it will always remain so. We must be vigilant and work to protect the rights of all to partake of the benefits and responsibilities of our democracy; working for the common good demands no less. “We the People” must cherish our vision of equity and social justice for all the people.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a landmark piece of federal legislation signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson and later amended five times to expand its protections. Designed to enforce the voting rights guaranteed by the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, it prohibits any state or local government from imposing any laws that result in discrimination against racial or language minorities.

In light of Shelby County v. Holder (2013) and voter suppression laws of the past few years, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 sounds downright quaint, despite being a highly effective piece of civil rights legislation. A reminder: the Shelby County v. Holder decision struck down the “coverage formula,” which encompassed jurisdictions that engaged in the most egregious voting discrimination in 1965, reasoning that it was no longer responsive to current conditions.

For the past six years, we have been witnessing an unprecedented, centrally coordinated campaign to suppress students, minorities, immigrants, ex-felons and the elderly from voting, according to the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization that has filed and handled many of the lawsuits against offending jurisdictions.

Rolling Stone magazine reports that Republicans have long tried to drive Democratic voters away from the polls, quoting Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and influential conservative activist, saying back in 1980, “I don’t want everybody to vote. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections goes up as the voting populace goes down.” Thanks to sentiments like his, a systematic campaign has been orchestrated particularly since the mid-term election of 2010, funded largely by David and Charles Koch through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), uncovered by an investigative report by the Center for American Progress (CAP). In 2011 alone, 38 states introduced legislation designed to impede voters at every step of the electoral process.

Many state legislatures have defeated these attempts, but a dozen have succeeded in approving obstacles to voting, such as voter-ID laws; restrictions on voter registration (such as placing onerous filing requirements on groups like the League of Women Voters), early voting (such as eliminating many days, especially Sundays — when many African-Americans tend to vote — formerly allowed), student voting (such as allowing voting only if students registered their cars in the state) and provisional ballots; barring ex-felons who have served their sentences from voting; and voter purges. Collectively, these laws are a significant burden for many eligible voters trying to exercise their most fundamental constitutional right. The five worst states for voting rights in 2011 and 2012 were Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Wisconsin and Kansas. The picture has changed somewhat in 2013 and 2014, as we’ll see below.

CAP reports that 11% of American citizens, but 25% of African-Americans, do not possess a government-issued photo ID (over 21 million citizens!) and three of the photo ID bills to have passed — in South Carolina, Texas and Tennessee — expressly do not allow students to use photo IDs issued by state educational institutions to vote.

According to CAP, the chief sponsor of Georgia’s voter ID legislation, Representative Sue Burmeister (R-Augusta), told the Justice Department the bill would keep more African-Americans from voting, which was fine with her since “if there are fewer black voters because of this bill, it will only be because there is less opportunity for fraud.”

As former President Bill Clinton said in 2012, “There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today.”

Republicans maintain that they are waging a virtuous campaign to crack down on rampant voter fraud, yet there is scant proof because voter fraud is exceedingly rare. According to Rolling Stone magazine, a major probe by the Justice Department between 2002 and 2007 failed to prosecute a single person for going to the polls and impersonating an eligible voter. Out of the 300 million votes cast during that period, only 86 people were convicted for voter fraud, and most of those cases involved immigrants and former felons who were simply unaware of their ineligibility.

Fortunately, the courts are blocking GOP-passed voter suppression laws, including in crucial swing states like Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin. “It is a remarkable development that courts across the country have almost uniformly rejected every single law passed making it harder for eligible citizens to vote,” says Wendy Weisser, director of the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “This is a clear rejection of attempts by politicians to manipulate the election laws for political gain.” It’s important to note that voter suppression laws have not been blocked unanimously, but the pushback against these laws has been extraordinary, sending a strong signal that restrictions on the right to vote are unconstitutional, discriminatory and unnecessary.

In the past few months, the courts have continued to hand down decisions that have upset Republican plans to suppress voting. The New York Times reports that the residents in Arizona and Kansas can register to vote using a federal form without having to show proof of citizenship; voter ID laws in both Arkansas and Wisconsin have been struck down; and finally, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul has become the most prominent member of his party to distance himself from campaigns for voting restrictions, declaring that these alienate the very people that the Republicans should be wooing.

Outside of a federal law that requires first-time voters to show a photo ID, state laws are completely inconsistent on this issue. During 2014, according to the National Conference of State Legislators (NCSL), voter ID legislation has been introduced in 24 states. NCSL says that 11 states have strict voter ID laws — 8 with strict photo ID laws and 3 with strict non-photo ID laws. Twenty states have less strict voter ID laws. The remaining 19 states currently require no documentation to vote.

Thanks to Judge Lynn Adelman, who invalidated the Wisconsin law in April 2014 that required a voter to present a government-issued ID, like a driver’s license or passport, judges in other states now have a detailed road map for challenges to similar laws. She found that over 300,000 Wisconsin voters, or 9% of all voters in Wisconsin, lacked the required ID — more than twice the margin of victory in the most recent election for governor. Judge Adelman found that most of these voters were lower-income and poorly educated residents who faced substantial barriers to getting the documents needed to obtain a photo ID. Furthermore, since the law had a disproportionate impact on minority voters, it also violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. This finding hands a potent weapon to challengers of similar laws in Texas and North Carolina — two states that are the focus of current efforts. “Latino Decisions”, an organization focused on Latino opinion research, and the Wisconsin ACLU, carried out the research that was critical to the ruling, according to the Daily Kos.

This past week, all eyes were on developments in North Carolina. The North Carolina NAACP, the Advancement Project, and the League of Women Voters filed a brief against a dizzying array of impediments to voting passed by the North Carolina legislature in 2013. “Without same-day registration [a common practice in that state until this year], without the full schedule of early voting, without voter protection from vigilante poll watchers, without the ability to cast provisional ballots if you mistakenly go to the wrong precinct, people in North Carolina will be disenfranchised during November’s critical elections,” said Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, president of the North Carolina NAACP. The legal team is confident that their challenge to the law will be successful.

But because of the amount of time that challenges to the law take, the Southern Coalition of Social Justice and the ACLU have requested the Federal Court to put North Carolina’s voter suppression law “on hold” for the 2014 midterm election.

One helpful device that will aid states in improving their electoral performance is courtesy of the Pew Charitable Trusts in conjunction with MIT. PEW has launched a revised Elections Performance Index (EPI), an online tool that provides the first comprehensive assessment of election administration in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. It is now possible, by using data from the 2012 election, to compare performance across the states and across election years. By juxtaposing the lowest-performing states with the highest-performing states, a clear picture emerges of the distinctions between the two on the 17 indicators.

Seven of these indicators are of primary interest to this article. They relate to voter registration rates, turnout, registration or absentee ballot problems, provisional ballots (cast or rejected), and online registration availability. The entire interactive report can be viewed online at www.pewstates.org/epi-interactive.

Our vision of equity and social justice naturally allies us with those who are fighting any kind of discrimination, whether it be racism, classism, ageism or gender discrimination. The common good demands that all people share the benefits and responsibilities of a democratic society, and a most precious benefit/responsibility is the privilege of voting — letting our voice be heard. For these and many other reasons of justice, NETWORK supports those who are working against voter suppression laws across the country and invites others to do the same.

The day after the election, NETWORK staff held a conference call for our members to discuss what we see going forward.

You can hear a recording of that call here:  http://youtu.be/ZR3KBJrfmEI

These are some of the things we talked about:

• What changed in Congress, and what didn’t
• How to use the state platforms that were created as part of the Election2012: Catholics vote for the Common Good project
• Power shifting in the electorate — from white men to women, people of color, and low-income people
• What will happen in the Lame Duck session of Congress
• Three projects that NETWORK is now focused on: Faithful Budget, Mend the Gap, and Medicaid expansion
• The “Catholic vote” and Catholic values

Over the past three years, tremendous achievements have been made on multiple fronts. Attempts to completely dismantle the security of the most vulnerable in our society have been averted. Unemployment benefits have been extended. The Iraq occupation is ending. But this is all at stake.

Your voice is just as important as your vote. We the people must engage in a national conversation for the common good.

After many months of gridlock on Capitol Hill, many now feel detached, frustrated and upset with Democrats and Republicans alike. But as NETWORK’s Executive Director Sr. Simone Campbell, SSS, explains in this video, this election may be the most important of our lifetime.

ursus.

Tuesday Nov. 8, polls will open for special elections in the United States Congress as well as local elections. While it is imperative to vote, it is equally as imperative to be cognizant of our other civic responsibilities.

The ability to change our laws in order to achieve the common good is one of the greatest aspects of our nation. We changed our laws to allow women to vote. We changed our laws to expand civil rights to all people. And in 2008, we elected a leader to bring change to the unethical trends that have plagued, corrupted and broken Washington.

We saw some change with that election. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act passed, which when fully implemented, aims to end the 45,000 deaths that occur every year due to Americans being uninsured.

Yet just two years later, Americans found themselves shifting towards a different change. This change was the polar opposite of what the American public asked for in 2008. A group of conservative leaders and big business owners began a movement so they could secure their corporate subsidies and lucrative tax breaks on the backs of working families.

Now we are outraged, but should we be? In the 2010 midterm elections, we elected representatives to the House that openly opposed the funding of the vital services that provide health and service to seniors, single mothers, children, and minority communities.

In the aftermath of that election, 1 in 15 people now ranks among the nation’s poorest of the poor, living on less than $11,000 a year. The wealth gap continues to expand at the expense of working families. Now, more than ever, we must raise our voices. Instead of focusing on the wealth gap, politicians on Capitol Hill are focused on slashing funding to various programs.

The reality is that a smaller government will not meet the needs of the poor or put millions back to work. A smaller government will not be able to meet our needs during a disaster like Hurricane Katrina. A smaller, deregulated government will not protect us from contamination in our water and food. But neither will a disorganized, fraudulent government lacking oversight. What we need is a smart government, one that protects our well-being. However, this is not possible if we keep dismantling our federal programs with devastating cuts.

Apathy has, unfortunately, become a disease in our society. Besides voting on Election Day, we seem to regress back into our daily routine of observing and complaining about the injustice in our world. Fortunately, signs have shown that there is change occurring. People are taking action, and it’s beginning with holding big banks accountable for their actions.

The Occupy Movement spread like wildfire despite ridicule and a blackout from the mainstream media. But unlike most social movements, this one is spurring change outside of the polls. In this past month, 650,000 Americans cashed out of big banks that caused the 2008 economic meltdown and put their money into credit unions. That amount of people totals more than joined credit unions in 2010 combined. Last week, America’s 5^th busiest port in Oakland, California was shut down in a general strike in response to violent tactics used by police on Occupy protesters there.  The national conversation is now focused on how Wall Street has occupied America.

Politicians must realize that change is not just a word they can throw around to save their own corrupt careers. It is an action the American people are demanding from them. We must keep the momentum of accountability present not only in the coming 2012 election, but also in our daily lives as well. Anyone can press a button or pull a lever when voting, but it takes Americans willing to participate in civic action to bring truly meaningful change.

Please sign our petition to President Obama, calling for a White House Summit on the wealth gap. We want to deliver this petition to the White House in July, with at least 10,000 signatures.

We believe the growing wealth gap is a crisis that needs White House attention.

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